THE NEW YORKER Chinese counting formulas (used to determine the role of chaser) that be- gin "Eenie, meenie, macca, racca" and "Inty, tinty, tethery, methery" (with a discussion of the "shepherd's score," the numerals that were suppos- edly used in the northwest of England in past times "by shepherds counting their sheep, by fishermen assessing their catch, and by old knitting women minding their stitches"). The writers' inescapable impression is that "chil- dren do not really enjoy competitive athletics." They explain, "The only running-race that comes to them natu- rally is the one that follows the chal- lenge 'Last one there is a sissy!' (or, as Samuel Rowlands reported in 1600, 'Beshrow him that's last at yonder stile')." They present the idea that "the more insignificant a game ap- pears, the more remarkable is its his- tory" (for example, Stroke the Baby, a game that they trace back to a wall picture in a tomb at Beni Hasan in Egypt, c. 2000 B.C., which shows "a player on his knees while two others, unseen by him, thump his back with their fists;" or the two-thousand-year- old Crusts and Crumbs, a game in which Crusts chase Crumbs, then Crumbs chase Crusts, and which Plato refers to in a passage in "Phaedrus" in commenting upon how lovers and loved ones often exchange roles). They point out that children and adults once played the same games, reminding us that in 1855 Palgrave, Jowett, and Tennyson diverted them- selves during the Christmas gambols at Farringford by playing blindman's buff-"in one form or another the sport seems to be part of the social history of the world" -after the chil- dren had been put to bed. They exam- ine the way in which, in the ball game Kingy, "those who are not He have the ball hurled at them, without means of retaliation, and against ever-in- creasing odds, an element that obvi- ously appeals to the national charac- ter." They suggest the likelihood that in acting games like Old Man in the Well, Fox and Chickens, and Mother, the Cake Is Burning, "children may be preserving for us, in however vesti- gial form, some of the most genuine folk-plays performed in Britain." And they present the apodictic conclusion that in their games "the young do not commonly invent, merely imitate. . . . What passes as original is due not to art but to artlessness, to mishearings, to imperfect understanding, to the three-foot-high viewpoint which sees a palace roof in a table top, and fears a thunderstorm when the dog snores." In the 1958 book "Man, Play, and Games," the French sociologist Roger Caillois quotes the ancient proverb "Tell me what you play and I shall tell you who you are." Certainly many of the games described by the Opies reveal children to be mirrors of the adult world. In the New York Times of March 12, 1982, John Darnton, reporting from Krakow, Poland, tells of how a group of Army officers who represented the ruling Military Coun- cil went on a tour of a nur- sery school. Darnton writes, "The acronym for the Council, WRON, is uncom- fortably close to the Polish word for crow, wrona, which has become its uni- versal nickname. The chil- dren swarmed around the officers, chanting a ditty: 'The black crow, it crows darkly and sees the world only in black.'" And in "Children's Games" the Opies point out that "in Ber- lin, when the wall was built ( 1961 ), West German children began shooting at each other across minia- ture walls," and continue, "In the United States, after the death of President Kennedy (1963), children were found playing 'Assassination.' Throughout time, it seems, juvenile performances have varied only as their surroundings have varied. In classical Rome, where the law was adminis- tered in public, Seneca observed Ro- man boys playing at judges and magis- trates, 'the magistrates being accompa- nied by little lictors with fasces and axes.' . . . And during the Second World War children in Auschwitz concentration camp, well aware of the reality, were seen playing a game that proved the most terrible indictment ever made against man, a game called 'Going to the Gas Chamber.' " In another sense, many children's amusements seem to reflect-and pre- serve-the atavistic behavioral pat- terns of early man's hunter-gatherer way of life; and the hierarchical, terri- torial, and aggressive aspects of these games might be seen to derive from what Paul MacLean has called the reptilian, or R -complex, part of the brain. (Carl Sagan has wondered "whether the frequent ritualistic be- havior in young children is a conse- quence of the still incomplete develop- ment of their neocortices.") But if children's games do perhaps reflect so- cial and neurological realities they are J"OtMr 55 often also forms of human communi- cation, types of learning situations, and symbolic models of conflict and resolution. As usual, the Opies cut through much theoretical clutter, sim- ply observing, "In the security of a game [ a child] makes acquaintance with insecurity, he is able to rational- ize absurdities, reconcile himself to not getting his own way, 'assimilate real- ity' (Piaget), act heroically without being in danger. . . . He can be confi- dent, too, in particular games, that it is his place to issue commands, to inflict pain, to steal peo- ple's possessions, to pretend to be dead, to h ur 1 a ball actually at someone, to pounce on someone, or to kiss someone he has caught. In ordinary life either he never knows these experi- ences or, by attempting them, makes himself an out- cast. " What is most significant and remarkable about the Opies' approach is that they never becloud with supercil- iousness or sanctimoniousness the clar- ity of their observations; in no instance do they abandon their role as mediums through which to present and explain the energy and impulses behind the games that children play and the rhymes that they recite. In "Chil- dren's Games," they write: Children seem to be instinctively aware that there is more to living than doing what is prudent and permitted. In a boy's world trees are for climbing, streams are for jumping over, loose stones are for throwing, and a high wall is a standing challenge to be mounted and walked along. . . . So it is that the juvenile tribe holds ritual games, almost as part of the process of growing up, in which the faint- hearted are goaded into being courageous and the foolhardy stimulated to further foolhardiness. . . . We have noticed that when children are herded together in the playground, which is where the educationalists and the psy- chologists and the social scientists gather to observe them, their play is markedly more aggressive than when they are in the street or in the wild places.... Often, when we have asked children what games they played in the playground, we have been told "We just go round aggravating I " peop e. ... Such behaviour would not be tolerated amongst the players in the street or the wasteland; and for a long time we had difficulty reconciling these accounts with the thoughtfulness and respect for the ju- venile code that we had noticed in the quiet places. Then we recollected how, in our own day, children who had seemed unpleasant at school (whose term-time be- haviour at boarding school had indeed been barbarous) turned out to be surpris-